Dr. Murphy presenting on memory and attention

Nipissing University associate professor of psychology, Dr. Dana Murphy will be giving a special presentation on memory and attention on Friday November 22 at 2 p.m. in room A257.The title of Dr. Murphy’s lecture is: When it comes to attention and memory, what you say may not be as important as how you say it.
Here’s the abstract: If you are talking with a friend at a busy party, you will easily shift your attention to another conversation when you hear your name or an important word such as “FIRE!” However, it may very well be the panic in the voice of the individual yelling “FIRE!” that attracts your attention rather than the word itself. In the studies discussed, I will present evidence demonstrating the importance of how we say words. In these studies, speech in which anger is conveyed through prosodic cues (such as tempo and pitch) will be shown to be both more distracting as irrelevant speech and more difficult to remember than speech conveying happiness. As these effects were similar in younger and older participants, the implications of these findings on prominent theories of cognitive aging (e.g., the inhibitory deficit hypothesis) will be discussed.?